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Human coders are still better than LLMs

antirez.com

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#41

Post by AnimalMuppet »

zdragnar wrote: post #13
wanderingstan wrote: post #7

“Better” is always task-dependent. LLMs are already far better than me (and most devs I’d imagine) at rote things like getting CSS syntax right for a desired effect, or remembering the right way to invoke a popular library (e.g. fetch) These little side quests used to eat a lot of my time and I’m happy to have a tool that can do these almost instantly.

I think that's great if it's for something outside of your primary language. I've used it to good effect in that way myself. However, denying yourself the reflexive memory of having learned those things is a quick way to become wholly dependent upon the tool. You could easily end up with compromised solutions because the tool recommends something you don't understand well enough to know there's a better way to do som…

So here's an analogy. (Yeah, I know, proof by analogy is fraud. But it's going to illustrate the question.)

Here's a kid out hoeing rows for corn. He sees someone planting with a tractor, and decides that's the way to go. Someone tells him, "If you get a tractor, you'll never develop the muscles that would make you really great at hoeing."

Different analogy: Here's someone trying to learn to paint. They see someone painting by numbers, and it looks a lot easier. Someone tells them, "If you paint by numbers, you'll never develop the eye that you need to really become good as a painter."

Which is the analogy that applies, and what makes it the right one?

I think the difference is how much of the job the tool can take over. The tractor can take over the job of digging the row, with far more power, far more speed, and honestly far more quality. The paint by numbers can take over the job of visualizing the painting, with some loss of quality and a total loss of creativity. (In painting, the creativity is considered a vital part; in digging corn rows, not so much.)

I think that software is more like painting, rather than row-hoeing. I think that AI (currently) is in the form of speeding things up with some loss of both quality and creativity.

Can anyone steelman this?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#42

Post by yua_mikami »

The thing everyone forgets when talking about LLMs replacing coders is that there is much more to software engineering than writing code, in fact that's probably one of the smaller aspects of the job.

One major aspect of software engineering is social, requirements analysis and figuring out what the customer actually wants, they often don't know.

If a human engineer struggles to figure out what a customer wants and a customer struggles to specify it, how can an LLM be expected to?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#43

Post by lukan »

pupppet wrote: post #23

If an LLM just finds patterns, is it even possible for an LLM to be GOOD at anything? Doesn't that mean at best it will be average?

There are bad patterns and good patterns. But whether a pattern is the right one for a specific task is something different.

And what really matters is, if the task gets reliable solved.

So if they actually could manage this on average with average quality .. that would be a next level gamechanger.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#44

Post by marcosdumay »

kccqzy wrote: post #21
wanderingstan wrote: post #7

“Better” is always task-dependent. LLMs are already far better than me (and most devs I’d imagine) at rote things like getting CSS syntax right for a desired effect, or remembering the right way to invoke a popular library (e.g. fetch) These little side quests used to eat a lot of my time and I’m happy to have a tool that can do these almost instantly.

> and most devs I’d imagine What an awful imagination. Yes there are people who don't like CSS but are forced to use it by their job so they don't learn it properly, and that's why they think CSS is rote memorization. But overall I agree with you that if a company is too cheap to hire a person who is actually skilled at CSS, it is still better to hoist that CSS job onto LLMs than an unwilling human. Because that unwi…

Hum... I imagine LLMs are better than every developer on getting CSS keywords right like the GP pointed. And I expect every LLM to be slightly worse than most classical autocompletes.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#46

Post by smokel »

marcosdumay wrote: post #33
mattnewton wrote: post #5

This matches my experience. I actually think a fair amount of value from LLM assistants to me is having a reasonably intelligent rubber duck to talk to. Now the duck can occasionally disagree and sometimes even refine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging I think the big question everyone wants to skip right to and past this conversation is, will this continue to be true 2 years from now? I don’t kno…

LLMs will still be this way 10 years from now. But IDK if somebody won't create something new that gets better. But there is no reason at all to extrapolate our current AIs into something that solves programing. Whatever constraints that new thing will have will be completely unrelated to the current ones.

Stating this without any arguments is not very convincing.

Perhaps you remember that language models were completely useless at coding some years ago, and now they can do quite a lot of things, even if they are not perfect. That is progress, and that does give reason to extrapolate.

Unless of course you mean something very special with "solving programming".

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#47

Post by ljlolel »

rel2thr wrote: post #37

Antirez is a top 0.001% coder . Don’t think this generalizes to human coders at large

Seriously, he’s one of the best on the planet of course it’s not better than him. If so we’d be cooked.

99% of professional software developers don’t understand what he said much less can come up with it (or evaluate it like Gemini).

This feels a bit like a humblebrag about how well he can discuss with an LLM compared to others vibecoding.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#48

Post by PartiallyTyped »

smilbandit wrote: post #19

From my limited experience, former coder now management but I still get to code now and then. I've found them helpful but also intrusive. Sometimes when it guesses the code for the rest of the line and next few lines it's going down a path I don't want to go but I have to take time to scan it. Maybe it's a configuration issue, but i'd prefer it didn't put code directly in my way or be off by default and only show whe…

> One thing I know is that I wouldn't ask an LLM to write an entire section of code or even a function without going in and reviewing.

These days I am working on a startup doing [a bit of] everything, and I don't like the UI it creates. It's useful enough when I make the building blocks and let it be, but allowing claude to write big sections ends up with lots of reworks until I get what I am looking for.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#49

Post by writeslowly »

decasia wrote: post #10

We aren't expecting LLMs to come up with incredibly creative software designs right now, we are expecting them to execute conventional best practices based on common patterns. So it makes sense to me that it would not excel at the task that it was given here. The whole thing seems like a pretty good example of collaboration between human and LLM tools.

I haven't actually had that much luck with having them output a boring API boilerplate in large Java projects. Like "I need to create a new BarOperation that has to go in a different set of classes and files and API prefixes than all the FooOperations and I don't feel like copy pasting all the yaml and Java classes" but the AI has problems following this. Maybe they work better in small projects.

I actually like LLMs better for creative thinking because they work like a very powerful search engine that can combine unrelated results and pull in adjacent material I would never personally think of.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#50

Post by einpoklum »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #32
ehutch79 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no. I've seen the twitter posts saying llms will replace me. I've watched the youtube videos saying llms will code whole apps on one prompt, but are light on details or only show the most basic todo app from every tutorial. We're being told that llms are now reasoning, which implies they can make logical leaps and employ creativity to solve problems. The hype cycle is real and setting expectations that get higher…

you will almost certainly be replaced by an llm in the next few years

You mean, as a HackerNews commenter? Well, maybe...

In fact, maybe most of has have been replaced by LLMs already :-)

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